Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system.
Most Windows-only users I am acquainted with seem to want a device that mostly “just works” out of the box, whereas Linux requires a nonzero amount of tinkering for most distributions. I’ve never encountered a machine for sale with Linux pre-installed outside of niche small businesses selling pre-built PCs.
Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun. These two groups of people seem as if they’re very fundamentally different in what they want from a machine, so a user who solely uses Windows moving over to Linux never made much sense to me.
Why did you switch, and what was your process like? What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?
I worked with windows and their servers for a long, long time. Fully delved into that ecosystem as it was between 2000-2019 or so.
In 2019 i quit the job I had then and went on a short sabbatical, severe burnout. I had played around with knoppix circa 2003, slackware as well, but I didn’t “get it”.
So the image of linux, in my head, were those experiences until 2019, when I took another look. I had a 500gb sata ssd that I was using to test out every distro under the sun, including a relatively successful install of BLFS. For 2 years I had tried all I could get my hands on, until I settled on my distro of choice.
Nuked my nvme, cleaned out almost all windows remnants from my homelab and went balls deep in linux.
So now I am off windows for about 5 years and I feel like I did when I quit smoking. I keep an install around on a spare ssd because I need fusion360 and a few games that only work on windows so I can keep up with the few friends I have.
But home is on my linux installs and every day, I enjoy the shit out of it.
I think most people should keep using Windows, especially pirates and pervs who look at nudey youtube, so that most malware continues to be made for Windows. (not that other OS can’t get malware)